As Others Have Seen You

Anyone who has lived for long enough can look back on their life and see where they made some pivotal decisions. Sometimes it's months of agonizing over what career to go into after school. Sometimes years of pain or joy come from quick, seemingly inconsequential decisions to take a puff, or walk this way instead of that and end up meeting someone who turned out to be very important to us.

It's kind of funny. We spend so much time planning for some decisions. Those decisions are often legitimately important on their own terms, like career or whether we move somewhere. Yet the little interactions that take just a few seconds can be just as impactful on our life, yet we can't plan for those.

These pivot points often involve other people. We look back and one sentence from someone changes our lives, or someone in one moment gives us a wound that charts the course of our next two decades, or some other quick interaction with outsized impact.

Whether God would agree with our assessment of the importance of the particular events we would identify, who can tell. I'm sure these pivot points come and go far more often than we realize. I would imagine some of the things He would judge as the most consequential are things so unremarkable to us we don't even remember them. Ask Him when you see Him.

We easily see at least some of the things that impact us. Some because, after all, nobody has as much experience as we have with ourselves, and some because thinking about ourselves is one of our favorite activities, in all the good and bad senses of that.

What is sobering, and scary, is that we have almost certainly been that pivot point in someone else's life, and as long as we draw breath, we may yet be some other pivot point in the future. These things we only rarely see in this life. These pivot points far less readily come to our minds, and I'm sure our accuracy with them is even worse than for our own pivot points.

It is very easy to see life only in terms of what we get out of it, for good or bad. What is this church doing for me? What is my spouse doing for me? What am I supposed to learn from these circumstances?

Those things do matter to some extent. But also important is, how are you impacting other's lives?

That guy at church who really annoys you. Maybe you are supposed to learn some patience from dealing with him... but maybe even more importantly, you're there to be an influence, or even that pivot point, in his life.

God thinks far more holistically than we can even dream of. Everything about the situations He creates is intentional. Everything is achieving many things at once, far beyond what we can see. But even so, it may be the case that in a real sense the primary reason you are experiencing something may be for somebody else's sake entirely and not really about you at all.

Everything you think you deserve out of a marriage, your spouse deserves equally... and that has to come from you.

Maybe you're in these circumstances primarily because you need to be in these circumstances to reach out to someone else who is in them too.

These moments are harder to identify in our lives because most of them require information from someone else about what they are. The ones I can think of in my own life are mostly guesses. There are things I can think of in my life where I think I was used by God to test someone else that I was completely oblivious to at the time. There are times where I think I was supposed to be at least try to be a pivot point, and I failed; these are some of my greatest regrets. Sometimes just 15 seconds I'd like to rewrite. There are others, God willing, where I think I may have more-or-less succeeded, at least at what I was supposed to do... I can't control how the other party reacts. We don't learn the full score this side of the divide.

We don't get to take a break from life itself. These pivot points can jump up unexpectedly, on either side of the transaction, at any time without warning. To say nothing of the more long-term day-to-day grind of interactions with others that influence them.

We can't plan for these times, but we can prepare for them, by following God, listening to Him, and preparing our character.